Dell announced today plans to offer new object-based medical storage system as part of its ongoing expansion of products and services for the healthcare sector.

The Dell Medical Archiving Solution, based on Dell's upcoming DX Object Storage Platform, is aimed at helping manage the explosion of data in healthcare, said Jamie Coffin, Dell VP of health and life sciences. It will begin shipping in May.

That growth in healthcare data is being fueled by the federal government's $20 billion-plus HITECH legislation that will begin next year to financially reward hospitals and doctors that implement e-medical record systems.

Expanded use of other healthcare systems and technologies--including medical digital imaging systems like picture archiving and communications systems (PACS), new digital pathology systems, and advancements in genomics and proteomics--are also fueling storage needs, said Coffin.

Dell's archiving offering is a "highly scalable, highly available, self-managing" platform that will let healthcare providers store data from multiple sources, including PACS from various vendors that are often found in a hospital's cardiology, radiology or others departments, said Coffin.

Scalability of the system is "in the peta bytes range, Coffin said. "There are no scalability issues." Policy-driven storage capabilities use metadata to automatically manage the location of stored data and the length of time it's stored for easier compliance with government regulations related to how long medical data is kept, Coffin said.

The system can also eliminate the need for tape back-up systems, which often don't offer the timely access to information that healthcare providers need, he said. "Doctors want to get information at their desks. They don't want to know where the data is."

Compared with $4 per gigabyte for SANs storage, the new Dell storage offering can provide archiving at about $2 per gigabyte, he said.

Dell is working on APIs so that the new archiving system can work with a variety of PACs products from different vendors.

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